Wired has a nice feature up on Ultima Richard Garriott and his cosmonaut training in Russia's Star City. Written by Masters of Doom author David Krushner, here's a sample:

It's one thing to adjust to life in Star City-but quite another to endure the confounding, confining, and sometimes just plain goofy training regimen. The first challenge is the language. Garriott is an autodidact wunderkind who persuaded his high school teachers that learning Basic code counted as fulfilling his foreign-language requirement. He won't be as fortunate at Star City. All of the instructions, instrumentation, and communications in space will be in Russian. So, for four hours a day, Garriott and Halik slave over fat, dusty language books in class, then tote them back to the Prophy to study more at night.

Great stuff. Click below to check out the full piece. Going to Space? [Wired]